Filmography

Die Stille vor Bach

2007

1.85:1|color|100 min

Die Stille vor Bach is an approach to music and the trades and subjects that surround it through Bach's works.
A look at the profound dramaturgic relationship between image and music where the latter is not merely conceived as subsidiary to the image butas a subject of the narration in its own right.
The film springs from a previously defined musical structure. The soundtrack feeds on works by J.S.Bach and two of Felix Mendelssohn's sonatas to create an architectural vault beneath which the story of the film unfolds; apromenade through the XVIIIth, XIXth and XXIth centuries led by the hand of J.S.Bach.

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Die Stille vor Bach is an approximation of music and its related disciplines and professions through the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. The film is a reflection on the deep dramaturgical relations between image and music, where music is not merely a subsidiary substratum of image, but a subject of parity.

The starting point of the film is a predefined musical structure. The sound track is composed of music by J.S.Bach, in addition to two sonatas by Felix Mendelssohn and an etude of Ligety, which create an architectural vault, under which the history of film unfurls: a passage through the XVIII, XIX and XXI centuries together with J.S.Bach.

Johann Sebastian Bach travelled to Leipzig with his family to occupy the post of Cantor at St. Thomas. A devoted and applied worker, Bach lived a far from privileged existence both socially and professionally; but his fame as a composer and performer grew exponentially over the course of his life and long after his death. Today he is both a benchmark of high culture and a popular icon.

Full stop.

There is no other story line in this film. As in the rest of Portabella's films over the last thirty years, Die Stille vor Bach is stripped of anecdote. It reveals no intimacy or scandal, and recounts practically nothing of what we don't already know; in fact Bach appears in few scenes. This is the complete opposite of a biopic. It also contrasts from the 35mm format of television series (today commercial films have people talking non stop because the film production industry no longer believes in image or cinema).

There is very little dialogue, but in a way the film speaks fundamentally of two things: work and History.

Through the concept of work the film chooses to discuss art. Bach is not a genius who creates ex nihilo by pure divine inspiration. He is an inexhaustible worker who sells his dedication and the product of his creative intelligence for money (little). He has to struggle to keep his position and he is conscious of the material conditions that allow him to be creative. The entire film is shot with live sound, underlining how music always proceeds from technique and physical instruments as well as effort and virtuous execution. Bach taught his son that the music that resounds inside the head is brought forth through the technique of performing. The characters in this film, including Bach, all work: they include truck drivers who play music, butchers who package entrails with scores from Bach, and piano tuners who are blind. You could say that the film also works; it refuses to limit itself to exploiting low passions or pandering to the spectators' expectations or their desire for escape. Instead the film asks the spectator to participate in the work of the film.

This is why in Die Stille vor Bach there is no linear story: as in Portabella's other films the story progresses through sequences that appear to have no other cause-effect relation than that attributed by the spectator (the final receiver). There is plenty of History, without the film turning into a historical super production; that is exactly what it is not. This is a European film. Europe grants it nationality, because Europe is the emotional, symbolic, historical and political backdrop of the film: it is the stage on which the film takes place. This film (shot in three languages: Spanish, Italian and Germany) maintains that Europe cannot continue without acknowledging the fact that beneath it's past (today transmuted into a tourist location for young backpackers) and its uncertain political present (dominated by technocracy and amnesia) lies a tense, conflictive, dramatic History (the heart of the film is set in Dresden). The splendour of its culture is inseparable from suffering and the impact of exploitation over centuries; its foundations are swarming with a multitude like that of Leipzig Market. Europe's present is no less tumultuous and ambivalent than its past.

In this country, we are so used to contemplating our navel that, instead of considering the general crisis which has befallen the cinema for the last decades, we reduce the problem to the bad health of Spanish cinema and blame our authors, our governments, the American film industry or the local audience; it gets even worse when we endeavor to defend our films flaunting box-office proceeds because, though this argument satisfies the accounting spirit, economic success is not precisely a unequivocal sign of artistic excellence. This debate is just as tiring, reiterative and fruitless as cinema itself (not only Spanish cinema!), which for years has insistently remained in the mainstream. The same worn out formulas and overly familiar outlines which the market imposes as dogma educate the spectator in vulgarity and tedious sensationalism. For this reason, when possible, the best solution to break out of this corrupt debate is to go to the theater to ascertain that, against all prognoses, there is life beyond this abusive credo. Die Stille vor Bach by Pere Portabella affords us one of these few opportunities. To begin with, it has a hygienic effect on memory: in a few minutes, the film manages to suspend the validity of the simplified and highly predictable syntax which we have come to regard not so much as hegemonic but as the only one possible. It reminds us that there are other ways of telling a story or linking images which do not presuppose the complete dullness of the spectator, which, instead of hurting or flattering his sensibility, stimulate his intelligence and his capacity for surprise. It reminds us that there are other forms of beauty, unfettered by the dominant canon of a vision atrophied by the clichés that saturate what can be seen in theaters. Secondly, because this film, by healing our memory, brings back to life our audiovisual imagination: to be capable of seeing in a different way is learning to look at the unfore-seen, coming to realize that it is possible to understand in a different manner what we see and hear, to free ourselves from the snapshots which take the place of experience and hold it hostage; in such a way that one exits to the outside world cured from some of the pandemic illnesses of sight. And, finally, because it is an excellent work about excellent work, about excellence and virtue in the field of art; but art written in lower-case in the sense that it is a plain mistake to believe that this is a message intended for the select aristocratic minority which exhibits high culture as a stamp of social distinction; it has much more to do with a sort of meticulous devotion and taste for a job well done, not defined by the social segregation of high and low. The critical charge of the film rests precisely in that it forces us to reflect upon the loss of this type of virtue in a society professing to be obsessed with training its members in useful abilities and preparing them for excellence... in a business sense. It also has to do with the mysterious magic of music and time. That this film may be shown in commercial venues is one of the most efficient remedies to combat the bad reputation of Spanish cinema and restore the dignity of the spectators.